


make ends meet when they're tattered and frayed

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Post-I Want to Believe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-06
Updated: 2008-10-06
Packaged: 2017-10-03 07:19:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the life she wanted.  She is not happy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	make ends meet when they're tattered and frayed

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: post-_I Want To Believe_  
> A/N: It's Tuesday on the East Coast! Happy temporary return of Smut Tuesday! Title is from Jonatha Brooke's "Digging". It's a good song to which you ought to listen. Kisses to [**jainanicole**](http://jainanicole.livejournal.com/) for calling me a liar. Didn't I follow through, buttercup?   
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this and no infringement is intended.

Scully gets home and finds, like every day, that she weighs her keys in her palm for a long minute before she can put them down. It is even longer before she can bring herself to shrug off her long buff coat, even though it is April and really too warm for it, and the mud that sucked at the soles of her shoes as she crossed the yard is spattered over the hem. There's no sense in it: she found the house, she decorated it. It should feel like home. But the throw pillows look much dingier they did in the store, and the house is stuffy, holding its breath against the kick of the central heat, and Mulder has left the juice out again. How he can remember to close the windows she flings open in the mornings and forgets, each day, that juice goes back into the refrigerator is a mystery to her. She sighs and slots the bottle back into the fridge, the cuffs of her coat still rubbing at her wrists. The puff of cold air as the door reseals makes her yearn suddenly to go for a run, but the faint trails she's found through their patch of woods are seams of mud. She'd feel worse for the effort. Reluctantly, she slides her arms out of her coat and hangs it on the beautiful antique coat rack that Mulder nearly gave to Goodwill when he was cleaning out his mother's house.

Even in her shirtsleeves, she doesn't feel settled. She can sense Mulder snipping away at newspapers in his closet. His singlemindedness reminds her of his irradiation by the alien artifact all those years ago and his catatonic focus, his eyes on her desperate but blurred, looking through her. She doesn't like to go into his office: more than once her bare feet have been cut by slivers of paper or stray pins, and even when she is shod, it reminds her too much of the past. She had a place in the basement. She has no place in this space. She is crowded out by the supernatural. Or, if she is truthful, she has removed herself from the shadows. She is not even in the morgue anymore, insulated by death: she has rejoined the world of the living and the normal. She should be happy.

This is the life she wanted.

She is not happy.

Scully half-sprawls in one of the stern kitchen chairs and takes a strange comfort from the painful way the slats dissect her back. The softness of the couch they chose together makes her feel as if she is lost and sinking, and the cushions do not serve as flotation devices. She will have angry red marks from the pressure of this bare wood, she thinks, but she does not move. She should start dinner. There are bags of beef stew in the freezer that she made the other weekend in the slow cooker. She finds that it is easier if she cooks in advance, spending her Saturdays dicing and slicing. There are no restaurants nearby and Mulder has never had a mind for earthly things. She reaches for a jar of multivitamins and turns it over and over, listening to the capsules tumble over each other, slightly sticky but each separate from the others, like her thoughts.

"Hey."

Scully jumps, startled, drops the vitamins, and knocks her elbow against the chair so that the bone jangles. Mulder pads in on damp bare feet, a towel tucked around his waist. His mouth is twisted into something too wry and apologetic to be a smile. "Sorry I startled you," he says, and looks into the fridge.

"I was just thinking," she says. The sight of him makes her stomach twist with longing. She wants him to cup her elbow in his hand and soothe the hurt. It makes her resentful, to want him so much after all this time, to need the comfort. She stays where she is. "How was your day?"

He twitches one shoulder and she watches the muscles play under his skin. They are getting older, but he is still marvelous to her, partly because he is still whole and sound, unexpectedly, and because he is so easy in his body. "Took a shower to clear my head," he says, cracking open a bottle of water and leaning against the counter. "You?"

"Same old," she says, levering up out of the chair. She remembers a time when an outsider would have needed several dictionaries to navigate their conversations. They have become mundane, monosyllabic, uneloquent. "Three colds, five vaccinations, a case of pneumonia, and a broken arm. Nothing they won't survive."

"Kids are resilient," Mulder says.

"They don't know any better," she says, and can't keep some bitterness out of her voice. She crosses to the freezer and pulls it open, peers inside, and lets it shut. Beef stew sounds unappetizing. She wants pho, or Ethiopian, or Chinese from that sketchy awful place Mulder dug up, or a grilled sandwich.

"There's a lasagna in the oven," Mulder says.

"Did you go to the store?" she asks, clicking on the oven light. The lasagna is in her glass casserole dish instead of the foil pan she expected, the noodles askew and the cheese pooling on one side.

"The Food Network is surprisingly educational," he says, leaning over her shoulder. He smells like soap and heat. The lumbering, clumsy way in which he has tried to take care of her overwhelms her; Mulder has always been a man of surprising grace and competency. She turns into his arms and clings to him, pressing her face into his chest to hide the way she's sniffling.

"Hey," he says and strokes her back. "It's not proof positive of the paranormal or anything."

"Thank you," she says against his throat, and takes a deep breath. "It's just been a long week. A long year. Ever since the winter, with all those poor dead girls and Father Joe, I just keep remembering."

"You've always found a way out of the darkness," he says, kissing the top of her head. "It's something I admire about you."

"I don't think there is a way out," she says. "Not after everything we've been through."

"You put on your bikini, I'll mix us up some boat drinks and build up the fire," he says. "It will be all right."

"It won't be all right, Mulder." She pulls back far enough to look into his eyes. "You can't imagine that I believe that you're happy here, never seeing anyone, no scope for your investigations. No resources."

"I need to get out of the house," he says with a grin that's lopsided with the wild despair of something caged. "I feel like Tooms in there, building a nest out of paper. I'm sorry. I know this was the life you wanted, and I'm trying, Scully."

"You can take the boy out of the city," she says, half to herself. Homesickness swells under her breastbone. She misses takeout and street signs and the grit of concrete under the soles of her running shoes. She misses movie theaters and grocery stores with ten brands of biscotti. She even misses the lemon astringency of the shampoo she used to wash away the morgue smell of latex and putrefaction and the clean stillness of the corpses as she dismantled their secrets. She cannot stay here, where life has no edges and the world is muddled with snow or mud or greenery. "Mulder, we dealt with it then."

"We did," he says, and there is a wistfulness in his voice that convinces her that she is right to do this. "It nearly killed us, Scully."

"At least we were alive," she says, and there it is, what she has been feeling all along and not saying. Here she feels dead. She sets her hip against his thigh, exhausted, taking strength from him. "We've been forgiven, Mulder. The prodigals are supposed to go home."

His hand slides up her back to the base of her neck and he crushes his mouth to hers with a desperate gratitude. She kisses back, starving for him, as if she has been Tantalus with him just out of reach. Mulder is her crucible: the trials of the week are burned away by the touch of his hands. She is fumbling with her own buttons like a teenager in heat, and he nudges her fingers aside and shucks her out of her clothes as easily as she's seen him peel corn out of the husk and leave it fresh and smooth and pale. Her shirt trickles from the counter to the floor, but she is still wearing her bra. With the clasp undone, the cups jostle under her breasts.

"You can write," she mumbles against his mouth, "you can write in the coffee shops, the library. You can consult for the Bureau. You can teach, oh, God, anywhere, please." His hands have found their way into her underwear; he crooks his fingers and pushes into her with the ease of long practice. She is trembling, half-dressed, the small of her back hot where she has jammed herself against the oven's handle for support, and he is still wearing the towel swathed around his narrow hips. Scully clutches at the terry, pulling him closer, trying not to slip backwards. Her trousers are pooled around her ankles and her heel is caught in the hem.

"You're incredible," he says with his lips brushing her ear. His jaw scrapes across her cheekbone. She is glad he has not shaved today. The scour of his stubble cuts through the complacency and dullness in which she has coated herself to keep the yearning at bay. He is peeling away all the onionskin layers of resentment and boredom, peeling both of them down to the bones of themselves. They have been living this papier-mache life she created. He twists his fingers inside her and the dream dissolves into urgency.

"Mulder," she says, breathless. His name is round in her mouth, sustaining but not solid enough. She wants to put her lips around his fingers, his cock, anything. She wants to be filled. He is finger-fucking her against the oven and his eyes are the same intense green they were the first time, in his apartment, in the dark, and she is panting with wonder. The glass of the oven sears her ass as he presses deeper into her; she cries out and stumbles against him. He kisses her in apology and settles her against the fridge instead, her feet braced wide, his thigh between them. She sinks her teeth into his shoulder and tongues the knob of bone there. He groans and pulls the tie from her ponytail, leaning into her body. His cheekbone chafes against her scalp as she tucks her face further into his neck. She rubs herself against him until she thinks the wiry hair on his chest will scuff her raw, penance for the life they have lived pushing each other away.

He pushes her shoulders until her back arches and murmurs in her ear, "You want to move this somewhere else?"

"I need you now," she grits out, trying to get her fingers around any pertinent part of him, but he eludes her grasp the way he always has.

"You're going to have to wait," he breathes and begins to slide that astounding mouth down her front. He kisses her throat until she forgets how to swallow, her head tipped back in breathless need, and her breasts until the heat of his lips burns away her breath, and each imprint of his mouth on her ribs, her hips, makes her skeleton light up as if she's seeing herself on x-ray on the backs of her eyelids. His tongue flickers across her clit and she yelps. She has worked all her life to contain her impulses within her body, within her clothes, and he undoes her so easily and hands her back to herself. Under his touch, she comes so fast and hard that she is startled, gasping with the breath half out of her.

"Jesus," she says, quite after the fact, pushing her hair out of her face with one sweaty palm. Mulder's shoulder has the marks of her fingers where she clutched at him. Her lips are swollen from his teeth. He nuzzles the front of her thigh, gazing up at her, myopic and foreshortened.

"Take pity on an old man's knees, Scully," he says, and the way his hair falls in his eyes makes him look like he did when she met him, nearly, and she surprises herself again by laughing. She drops her bra on the kitchen floor and steps out of trousers and heels and finally, finally looses the towel from its failing hold on his hips and drops it on top of the pile of her clothing. He reaches for her hand and leads her to their bed, easing her down. She feels swollen, sated but willing, aching for the touch of him inside her. His cock nudges her leg and she slides her hand down to curl her fingers around his shaft.

"You seem to have me well in hand," he cracks, his thighs rolling against hers as he levers himself up.

"I succeeded beyond the FBI's wildest expectations, didn't I?" she parries, and he laughs, and it's as if spring has finally come. His laughter is the noise of branches shedding snow. She hooks her knee over his hip and urges him in: he holds his breath, as if the pressure is too exquisite to bear, and they relax together. It is familiar and comfortable and still so surprisingly good. She didn't think it would be this way, but he still touches her as if he's worshiping at a mortal altar of the flesh, something holy and wholly sensual. Her fingertips find the places that make him groan against the corner of her mouth, and he strokes her inside and out with fingers and cock, all slickness now, no friction. When she comes again it is like a wave cresting, a gentle swell and fall, and he pauses to let her ride it out. She urges him on with her hips as his thrusts grow more urgent. His eyes are wild as he bucks into her, but it is a feral glory, not a desperation, and he sinks down against her with a long strangled sigh.

"I hope," she says, out of breath, "I hope our bones lie together like they did in that haunted house."

"Like those kids in the mushroom field," he says, and kisses her palm, and she is home.


End file.
